Tools

Seven-segment

A friend showed me Markus' 7-segment RGB hack. Since we liked it so much, I decided to hack together 2 digits. I had an old red 7-segment module and a RGB 4x4 matrix module. Using that, the setup was put together in a few hours.

Contents

Hardware

The 7-segment hacking part pretty much went place like markus described it despite that I used 3mm SMD RGB LEDs.

Shrinking tube was used to group the wires.

After all LEDs were removed from the 4x4 module, wires were soldered to the PCB. All the wires give quite some stability. Surely enough for a quick test:

Software

A PC running Ledcat has been used to send single frames to the LEDs at 50 fps. Normally one would probably use professional video-effect/syntheziser/editor software to generate a fancy 7-segment animation but I wanted to use ImageMagick with some python scripts to just quickly generate a nice animation, so I used a very small 8x5 pixel image format:

- each white pixel represents one of the 7 segments + the dot from 2 digits.

According to the way the LEDs were soldered to the PCB (basically random, or "best-fit"), the tile-configuration looked like this: